


For Every Kind Stranger

by Brachylagus_fandom



Series: Good Bones [1]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Ishbalan Character(s) | Ishvalan Character(s), Ishval Civil War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-15
Updated: 2016-10-15
Packaged: 2018-08-22 15:44:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8291338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brachylagus_fandom/pseuds/Brachylagus_fandom
Summary: Before they called him Scar, he was a boy named Joshua. Before he hunted State Alchemists, he lived in a small village long since forgotten.It's still out there, buried in the sands of Ishval. He's not sure he wants to find it.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sevenofspade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenofspade/gifts).



> This starts right around the beginning of the Ishvalan Civil War and progresses through the length of the series into a bit of post-canon. It's not too dark, but anything covering Scar's life is going to be dark and vaguely depressing.

Joshua's father left when he was eighteen, two days after the War broke out; there would be a council of elders in the capital, and he was to attend. With their mother long since passed, it fell to Joshua, the eldest, to take care of his siblings.

Twenty-one days after his father left, one of Joshua's sisters woke from a nightmare and he began to worry; Esther was no stranger to nightmares, and her dreams had a disturbing tendency to be prophetic. Joshua started to fortify the town. When soldiers showed up two days later, Scar and his eldest brother stood to fight; their siblings, along with the other village children, are holed up in the temple, which was the closest to a fortress they had.

By the time Joshua, bloody-handed, brotherless, made it back three days later, the temple was a collection of ruins and blood stained the streets. They had fought to the last, and now there wasn't enough of them left to bury.

He grabbed what he could and ran. Four towns away, there were still living people. Joshua decided to help them try to survive. He was a stranger, but it was war, and they would need all the help they could get.

"Scar man! Scar man!" one of the children shrieked. One of the monks tried to shush him, but Joshua turned to the child.

"What?" he asked. The child grinned, showing a missing front tooth.

"Brother Ezekiel said that he wanted your help. He's over on the south side." Scar nodded and went to help Brother Ezekiel. Just as he assumed, they were breaking old brick walls not high enough to be of use into rubble and filling a trench with the pieces; at the very least, it would make riding into the city more difficult.

When he returned to the village proper at dusk, it was a massacre; the soldiers had climbed the high wall on the opposite side of the town while they were still forming the trench. The scene repeated in each town he traveled through. By the time he left Ishval, the southern half was smoldering ruins and the north not much better. 

***

Ten years later, he started looking up the alchemists who fought in that war. On principle, he left out Armstrong; acknowledgment of wrongdoing forgave him of his wrongs. He had spent a decade watching hundreds of dead children and the reason they died being forgotten, and it was time for that to stop.

The media called him Scar, for the sign of Kimblee's torture. The public called him a monster. Some, if not many, people quietly called him justified. He didn't care. He called himself an avenger, the Bloody Angel of Ishval, and that was all that mattered.

His vengeance ground to a temporary halt when he fought what he would learn were homunculi. What barely constituted a battle started a few hours before sundown; he woke up in the refugee camp just before noon three days later. The old monk smiled at him, knowing him by reputation or maybe even by name, and said that he should rest.

Scar could never rest. He had his brother's array on his arm, the screams of dying children in his ears, and blood on his hands that could never replace that of those he had lost. If patience and poetry could tell this story in reverse or write an ending where his family still lived, he would be sitting in some quiet place or taking up one of the great poet titles. Esther had written reams of sonnets and odes; maybe, if she had gotten the chance to grow up, there would be a new epic added to the Canon of Ishval under some pretty and quietly powerful alias.

Scar shook his head. Now was not the time to think of futures long gone or what his little sister could have grown up to be; now was the time to make those who precluded those futures and killed his family suffer like he did. He was stopped from getting up by a jolt of pain; clearly, it would be a few days before he could continue his mission.

Slowly, as if checking to make sure they wouldn't be caught, children started to peek through the tent flaps. Scar sighed; he would not be getting any respite from the attentions of people with big eyes and soft hearts any time soon. Then again, he wasn't sure that was a bad thing; it would be good to have a reason for this madness beyond a painful history and legion upon legion of ghosts.

***

History repeated itself, and Scar lived long enough to watch his ghosts come back alive.

First was May. She, all of twelve and tiny and all alone in a foreign land, had a light in her eyes that Scar had watched die too many times before; she was every child he had known and lost reincarnated, and her shoulders sagged with the weight of the task before her.

In the weeks they traveled together, Scar marveled how she could still be happy while being her clan's only hope for salvation. He had spent his entire adult life breaking and being broken; she had spent hers under tremendous pressure and turned into a diamond instead of a thousand tiny pieces. When they went their separate ways, Scar hoped that it would stay that way; some small, stubborn part of him wished that she would not go the way of so many strong people he had seen break and good people he had seen die.

Winry was a somewhat more painful story. She was the spitting image of her mother, one of two people Scar had never wanted to kill. Because of him, she had been an orphan since the age of six and knew exactly whose fault it was. When Winry quietly asked about Ishval on a long, freezing train ride, Scar was abruptly taken out of his train of thought. "What?"

"School never taught us about Ishval before the civil war," Winry said. "What was it like?"

"Beautiful." Scar would have ended the conversation there if he couldn't still see the blood staining the walls as he discovered just how much power his brother had held in his body. "I'm sorry for your parents."

"Don't be. They knew what they were getting into."

"I don't think anyone did." Scar left it at that. Winry had been a child when the war broke out and was barely an adult now. She had not lived through a war, let alone fought in one. She had no idea what Ishval had really been like, before the war or during it; she could never understand just what her parents had done in the name of aid, and he did not have the words to tell her.

***

The children were following him again. Scar gritted his teeth and resisted the urge to tell the group to get lost; if he did, then they would run to Miles, and Miles' I'm-ashamed-of- _ you _ looks were something he was trying to avoid.

Four months ago, a group of orphans had appeared out of nowhere, and they had been following him ever since. What had once been their capital was, even after six months of rebuilding and with aid from several alchemists, half in ruins, and the sand still had rust-colored streaks from the War. They had not gone along broken roads for the other towns yet, and Scar wasn't sure he wanted to; he was more than happy to let old settlements lie forgotten in bloodstained sands.

If Scar had his way, these children would not know war like he did. This generation would grow up in a town rebuilt from ruins and never see it knocked down. They would become teachers or monks or poets or whatever else that dreamed of being. They would not end up like him, bitter and fighting a one-man war of revenge against a country that had done its level best to kill him; their lives would not be determined by a desperate attempt to not forget what they had lost or a war created specifically to kill thousands of people. No, these children would get to have an actual future, and he would gladly take up arms again to ensure it.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry this isn't super plotty. I tried, I probably failed, and please take this angst as my apology.
> 
> The title is from Maggie Smith's "Good Bones". The full quote is "and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you", which I thought was a good description of Scar and his life. The entire poem is good title fodder, especially for something like FMA where the past/background of the series is dark and the main characters are pushing for a better future.
> 
> Warrior cultures also having a strong culture of arts is a thing that happens a few times throughout history, though I have no clue why. Mostly, I included it because I like the idea of Ishval being a fairly peaceful culture before the Ishvalan Civil War and because the idea of Scar writing angsty peotry makes me laugh.


End file.
